The dark past of colonisation casts a shadow over Western European countries. But there was a brighter side to the conquest: what did the British give India? Who freed and abolished slavery? To what extent are we paying the heavy price of colonisation in the present? Our interview with Professor Nigel Biggar of Oxford.
Do you feel bad because of the colonialist past and history of the United Kingdom?
No, I don't feel bad because I didn't do it so I'm not responsible for it. Also, I resist the pressure from the left to feel guilty. If you feel guilty, then you're vulnerable to political manipulation. We shouldn't feel guilty not only because we didn't do it, most of those involved in the British Empire are dead now, but more importantly, the empire achieved some great milestones while having a darker side of course. So, if we're going to feel anything, we should feel a mixture of lament the bad, and admire the good.
If you look at public opinion in the US, or France, or even in the UK, there is a kind of political and social pressure to deny and shame the colonial past.
The pressure partly comes from universities and obviously from anti-racist lobbying groups. The pressure exerted on educated middle classes who know nothing about the history however they know that to be considered racist is bad, so they tend to accept what the left tells them.
What is the psychology of this phenomenon?
It's partly a continuation of the left's longstanding critique of the capitalist West. It's often been observed that the left has abandoned the economic struggle because socialism and communism as an economic project has been discredited thus the new left has focused on culture, particularly on race in America and Britain. The argument: Britain is systemically racist because our colonial past was essentially racist and therefore, we have to repudiate our 350 years’ worth of imperial endeavour. We must pull down statues and change place names to purge ourselves of our systemic racism. Britain is not systemically racist, and our colonial history was not essentially racist, so this rationale defies the facts. The leftist opposing point of view doesn't respond with scepticism and reason, it responds with aggression as it doesn't want to listen. Now that's when the psychology becomes interesting because this is not about ideas. There are deep interests here that do not want to hear contradiction. Self-righteousness is dangerous because it leads you to abuse other people.
You mentioned that the educated middle class is afraid of stigmatization of being racist because they do not know history. How are could they be educated then?
When I was going through school in the 1960s, we learned a narrative about the development of Britain, it was a narrative of the increasing constitutional constraints on executive royal power. In recent decades, the teaching of history in schools of that kind has been abandoned and instead school children are encouraged to imagine what it was like to be a slave or imagine what it was like to be in the trenches in the First World War. They're given kind of snapshots of the Nazis, or slavery and they have no sense of the continuity of history and large parts of our past is completely ignored. People are educated, but historically they are not educated in terms of how we got to where we now are.
Regarding the colonial we know the dark side well. Could you show me the light side?
Following 150 years’ worth of British involvement in slave trading and slavery, the British Empire abolished slave trade in 1807, slavery in 1833, and then used imperial power for a century and a half to abolish slavery from Brazil, Africa, India to Malaysia. Also, the British Empire presided over the birth and development of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, all of them among the most prosperous and liberal states in the world. Finally, between May 1940 when France fell, and June 1941 when the Germans invaded Soviet Russia, the British Empire was the only military power opposing Nazi Germany with the exception of Greece. Although the Allies' victory in the Second World War owed more to America and indeed the Soviets, without Britain resisting Nazi Germany in that period, the invasion of Normandy would probably never have happened.
When I was in Paris a French Senator said that the French colonization wasn't a nightmare like the British one. It was a civilizational process in Maghreb Africa. Do you argue?
Yes. The contrast is often made between the French Empire versus the British Empire. The British Empire was about trade, particularly with India, to start with, and then Africa. There's nothing wrong with trade, and there was a strong and growing humanitarian, civilizing mission from the 1800s onwards. Then as time went on and Britain acquired various territories, it recognized its responsibility to try and build a stable political environment which then encouraged British investors to invest money and grow the economy. Even though the British Empire began with trade and oftentimes they acquired territories through warfare, as time went on, the humanitarian and liberal motives grew, and the British recognized their responsibility to try to build and develop stable states. In the 1820s, the three main cities of British India – Calcutta, Bombay, Chennai – were all governed by Scotsman who have said: “we will not be here forever – all we can hope to do is to build a sufficiently stable state and then leave with grace and hopefully with a good will of Indian people”. Even back then, there was an awareness that we can try and build something worthwhile and then leave. After the Second World War because the largest body of soldiers in the British Empire were Indian, several million fighting under the Union Jack as volunteers. Why did they volunteer to fight under the British flag? Not because they wanted the British to stay forever, but they did not want the Japanese to rule India, and they did want to rule India through the institutions that the British had built. That pays a certain tribute to the Empire, it built institutions that native people then to maintain.
The past is behind is, let's get back to the present. With such a colonial past there are some consequences right now. The chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow as a good consequence, but the suburbs of London after 9 p.m. are the bad consequence. How can you solve the negative consequences of the past?
We need to distinguish slightly the legacy of the Empire and the immigration. Lots of immigrants in Britain didn’t come from the Empire, but many did and particularly after the Second World War, when people were encouraged to come from India and Pakistan to work in British factories or run the buses in London. People from, especially in the case of India, came from very different cultures and we have not been entirely successful in integrating them as it is a difficult business. But my own perception is that in Britain we have done a better job than France.
Yet somewhere along the line, successful integration was derailed.
When a mass of people come to a new country there is a risk creating ghettos. I lived in Leeds and in Bradford there was a large Pakistani community. I asked a man who was working for the Church of England in Bradford: what are you doing to build bridges between the English and the Pakistani community? He said: “well, we try, but the Pakistani community is not interested because they have their own shops, trading, mosques, why do we need to integrate?” They are totally self-sufficient and that's a problem in terms of social cohesion. That's why I think control of immigration is very important. You shouldn’t refuse all immigrants because they can bring needed skills, new ways of thinking which can be valuable, but immigrants have a duty to learn if they choose to come to Britain. They need to realize that they are coming to a country with certain laws and customs, certain assumptions, and as an immigrant they have a duty to accept that. It's difficult to communicate with a crowd that lived together in the other side of the planet because they retain their own ways. In my lifetime the integration process has improved enormously: one obvious symptom is that in the last government of Boris Johnson, almost every secretary of state in charge of the major departments was non-white. What was remarkable that these people rose to the top of government in the Conservative Party – it wasn't a controversy because they were educated in England, they understand Britain.
Once I talked with an old professor who was born on Ceylon – Sri Lanka today. He said that neo colonization is emerging through international companies. In Sri Lanka, a person working in an international company called coconut because he is black outside, but white inside. How do you see neo colonization?
Empires take different forms, and it is commonly understood that the British Empire had both formal and informal. The informal empire was the investment of British capital in building railways in Argentina or the soft power of culture. A kind of imperial dominance of multinational companies can provoke resentment. Inequalities of power – some dominating, some being dominated – is a fact of life. In my lifetime, USA has come to dominate the West, and I'm aware in my early years that the British resented American dominance, partly because we lost it. Those who dominate have a moral duty and if they want to be successful in dominating, they ought to be sensitive to those they dominate, because otherwise they will provoke a reaction which may well be done for business. If you're simply expedient and you want to prosper as a business, take care not to humiliate natives. Calling someone a coconut? Dividing the world into white and black, it's too crude because cultures are constantly negotiating and borrowing from one another.
Nigel Biggar is Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. Nigel Biggar is author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, a Sunday Times bestseller. He chairs the board of trustees of the Free Speech Union. His hobbies include visiting battlefields. In 1973 he drove from Scotland via Iran and Afghanistan to India. And in 2015 and 2017 he trekked across the mountains of central Crete in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his comrades, when they abducted General Kreipe in April-May 1944.